Participation Terms

If you submit your work to the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, you must agree to these terms. Your parent/guardian and educator must also agree to them. These terms will be a binding agreement once you and your parent or guardian agree to them, so please read them carefully. If we use the word “Awards” here, it means the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and the word “Alliance” means us, the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, Inc., the non-profit organization that presents the Awards.

Judging Criteria and Freedom of Expression

Jurors who review Awards entries are asked to weigh three core values: originality, technical skill, and the emergence of a personal vision or voice in determining whether a submission receives an Award.

Young artists and writers are free to explore any and all topics.

Eligibility

To participate in the Awards, you must be a student in grades 7–12, age 13 years or older, and (a) residing in the United States, U.S. territories, or Canada, or (b) enrolled in an accredited American School in the rest of the world.

License

Students who submit works to the Awards will retain any intellectual property rights they have in their works, including copyright. This means, for example, you can submit the same work you submit to us to other scholarship programs or contests, keep the work in your portfolio, and license it to others for non-exclusive publication.

To run the Awards, the Alliance needs to be able to do certain things with the students’ works, such as copying, editing, and displaying them to process and judge submissions, award prizes, and publicize winning entries. To do these things, we need permission from you. So, when you submit your work to the Awards, you give the Alliance permission to use your work in a wide variety of ways without further permission or approval from you as part of the Alliance’s mission to promote creative self-expression among young people. Formally, this means you grant the Alliance a license to use, copy, change, publish, publicly perform, distribute, exhibit, or add to your work. This license is perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, transferable, and non-exclusive (with the right to sublicense). The Alliance can use your work in any media, including online.

You also give us permission to use your name, photograph or other image of you, biographical information, and live and taped interviews, appearances, or performances given or made by you in connection with the Awards, including promotion of the Awards and the Alliance. We will give you credit when we use your submission in a public way, unless there is a practical reason why we cannot, such as formatting, or if the work is being used in a medium where no individual credits are given. Also, if we mistakenly do not give you credit in any given situation, if you let us know, we will try to correct that for similar uses in the future.

We will not pay you for your submission or our use of your submission, except for any cash award or scholarship you may be granted through the Awards.

We may include your work in our publications, such as The Best Teen Writing. We will not license your work to others to publish the work under their name for their own commercial gain.

Materials Return

If your work is selected to receive a National Award in art, the Alliance may require you to send the original physical work, if applicable, and keep that physical work for two years. During those two years, that work may be used in exhibitions throughout the country, so the Alliance will not be able to give you access to the physical work during that time. If we ask you to provide work for exhibition and you do not, we may choose to revoke (that is, take back or cancel) your award.

After the two-year period, the Alliance will return the physical works using the contact information on the Submission Forms completed at the time of entry (or updated contact information students give the Alliance). For this reason, and to allow for any other necessary or appropriate contact, National Award recipients must let the Alliance know if their addresses or other contact information changes. The Alliance is not responsible for any non-delivery or loss of, or damage to, student work that may result from students’ failure to do so.

If the Alliance is not able to return the physical works to a student for any reason, including refusal of delivery or lack of forwarding instructions, the Alliance may hold the student work up to three (3) years from the date of the National Award notification. If the work is not retrieved by the student, the Alliance may continue to store the physical work, or it may destroy it.

THE ALLIANCE, THE SCHOLASTIC ART & WRITING AWARDS, SCHOLASTIC INC., ANY SPONSORS OF THE AWARDS, OR ANY OF THEIR RESPECTIVE EMPLOYEES, AGENTS, OR REPRESENTATIVES SHALL NOT HAVE ANY OBLIGATION OR LIABILITY WHATSOEVER FOR ANY LOSS OR NON-DELIVERY OF, OR DAMAGE TO, THE WORK THAT IS NOT CAUSED DIRECTLY BY SUCH PERSON’S OR ENTITY’S WILLFUL OR RECKLESS MISCONDUCT.

Copyright & Plagiarism

All work submitted to the Awards must be original, meaning you create the work based on your own ideas. By submitting work to the Awards, you agree that you created it and did not copy it from any other person, business, school, or organization. Any work that infringes anyone’s intellectual property rights will be disqualified. You, not the Alliance, are responsible for getting any necessary consents or releases from people or for any places or property depicted in your work.

Violations

The Alliance may revoke a student’s participation in the Awards and take back or cancel any awards made by the Alliance if we determine that a submission does not meet the requirements of these Participation Terms or other applicable Alliance policies (for example, any policies that apply to participants from certain regions) or that a participant has violated these Participation Terms or other Alliance policies in any other way. Any participant whose award is taken back or cancelled may not identify himself or herself as the recipient of an award from the Alliance.

National Student Poets Program

If you are selected as (and agree to be) a National Student Poet based on your submission to the Awards, these terms will also apply to your participation in the National Student Poets Program. Additional terms for the National Student Poets Program will be made available to you if applicable.

About the Online Registration System

Participants must have email accounts in order to submit their work to the Awards, because submissions can only be received on the Awards website. During the selection process, jurors do not have access to personal information, whether submitted with your entry or otherwise. If you are having technical difficulty with the online registration system, please contact info@artandwriting.org. In the email, include your name, contact information, name of your school, and school’s zip code.

Note to Educators and Parents: An educator, counselor, or principal, AND a parent/guardian must review and sign each submission form. Be sure to read all rules and guidelines with your students. We rely on educators to make sure that submissions adhere to our guidelines.